Learning Forensics Through Literacy And Inquiry

By Author: peter
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Sharon, who teaches in a large suburban high school in the southwestern United States, responded to her students' out-of-school interests by developing a unit on forensics. She designed the three-week unit for her chemistry sections of about 55 students. The unit was structured to be inquiry based and incorporate a range of texts to aid students in becoming scientific thinkers. Recognizing that individuals both form and represent their ideas through language (Vygotsky, 1978), Sharon designed activities that provided opportunities for reading, writing, and discussing scientific concepts. She wanted her students to experience how scientists read, write, and talk science in the process of scientific inquiry (Lemke, 2004). She designed the forensics unit to develop her students' problem-solving and inquiry skills and to foster students' learning of scientific concepts through the use of real-life situations.

To increase students' ability to analyze, evaluate, and communicate scientifically, the Frank Muller Replica Watches inquiry-based unit incorporated a variety of literacy activities. ...
... These activities included reading and solving crime scenes, writing murder mysteries by using forensic evidence (e.g., fingerprinting, blood spatter patterns, and dental records), and reading and discussing forensic-related WebPages and print texts. To capitalize on the social nature of adolescents, these activities were usually done with partners or in small groups to address student-generated questions.

It is up to the prosecution to provide evidence to destroy the null hypothesis. If the prosecution is unable to provide such evidence, the accused goes free. If the null hypothesis is refuted, we accept the alternative hypothesis and declare that the accused is guilty. Bear in mind that if the accused goes free, it does not mean that the accused is indeed innocent. It simply means that there was not enough evidence to find the accused guilty. Nor, if the accused is cotwicted, does it mean that the accused did indeed commit the crime. It simply means that the evidence vase so overwhelming that it is highly improbable that the accused is innocent. Only the accused knows the truth.

In this context, suppose the accused is innocent, in fact, but is found guilty. Then a Type I error has been made because the null hypothesis has been rejected erroneously. Thus, the probability of convicting the innocent would be a, and we would like to keep this value rather low. On the other hand, if a guilty person is declared not guilty, a Type II error has been made with probability,

Sharon designed these cooperative literacy activities to correct students' misimpressions that science is a solitary and competitive endeavor (Koke, 2005). The activities also demonstrated to students that scientists use language and literacy to discover and record their ideas. The unit emphasized the literacy—science connection and responded to the call for literacy and science to be taught together (Saul, 2004). These cooperative language arts activities capitalized on the learning styles and preferences of girls who tend to prefer collaboration but are often marginalized by boys in science instruction (AAUW Educational Foundation, 2000; Koke, 2005).

Sharon's primary goal was to develop her students' inquiry skills through critical thinking and reading. To accomplish this goal, she first constructed a forensic science curriculum map (a chart that showed the specific state standards for science based on the Hublot Replica Watches National Science Standards; National Research Council, 1996) that each day's lesson addressed, the lesson plan and activities for that day, and the skills or outcomes for that lesson.

The first day's lesson addressed two state standards: formulate predictions, questions, or hypotheses based on observations and evaluate scientific evidence for relevance to a given problem and predict the outcome of an investigation based on prior evidence, probability, and/or modeling. The first lesson included reading a crime mystery aloud to the class and asking the students to identify the culprit, write their rationales for their choice, and discuss their ideas first with partners and then with the whole class. The outcomes for this lesson were for students to be able to distinguish observations from inferences and to be able to apply inquiry skills to solve a mystery.